Once you’ve developed a detailed avatar for your ideal customer, it’s time to move on to Stage Two of The Marketing Canvas™: Your Customer’s Needs.

If you’ve read Step 1, you may be wondering why it was necessary to go into so much detail when you went through the process of identifying your Target Customer. We’ve found that spending lots of time up front pays off as you start working your way through the rest of The Marketing Canvas™. Nowhere is that more true than exploring your customer’s needs.

This step forms the foundation for everything else that follows as you move through the rest of The Marketing Canvas™ strategy. Creating a robust and comprehensive marketing plan requires that you always keep your customer’s needs in mind. As businesses, we often fall into the trap of focusing on what we need from our customers (whether that’s likes, conversions, reviews or referrals). In fact, what’s most important is to turn things around so you are focused squarely on what your customer needs from you.

Don’t Default to the Most Obvious Answer: Keep Digging

It can be tempting to tackle the Customer Needs block in The Marketing Canvas™ by defaulting to the obvious, stated needs of the customer. A good example is that of a customer who comes into a hardware store in search of a drill. The salesperson may then ask a lot of questions about how big of a drill the customer wants, price point and so on. However, this approach doesn’t ever address what the actual challenge is that the customer is facing. The customer actually doesn’t need a drill, what they need is a hole.

If that hole is in thin drywall or metal roofing, a punch might be a much more efficient and economical solution. But until the salesperson asks questions about the type of project, material, number of holes, and so on, it’s not likely that the best solution will be found — from the customer’s perspective.

What is Your Customer’s Pain Point?

This stage is all about digging deep, asking questions, and really understanding the customer’s pain points, the underlying needs that drive their search for a solution. In some cases, customers don’t know that certain solutions even exist that could solve their underlying problem. Take our drill-seeker above — they might not even realize that a punch might be the perfect solution for their hole-creation project.

Here’s another example. A client in the eCommerce space may approach us asking for a new website design. They may have no idea that it might be more effective to create a sales funnel with a landing page optimized to collect leads and drive traffic to a special offer in their existing eCommerce storefront. Thinking about needs — such as hope, certainty, safetyor empowerment can be very helpful in terms of shifting the focus from what you have to offer to what your customer is really looking for.

Understanding Customer Needs is Directly Related to Encouraging Action

This approach, while more subtle and nuanced, can provide profound insights into what, ultimately, will motivate your customer to take action and is effective regardless of what your company or organization is hoping to accomplish.

Let’s have a look at an example from the non-profit sector. An organization that plants trees as a way to mitigate climate change may need funding and/or manpower to plant trees on Earth Day. The reason a potential contributor may wish to fund a tree might be to meet a need to feel optimistic that they can play some small role in helping to make a difference in terms of helping the environment. Perhaps the underlying need is the desire to be part of a community of like-minded people or to provide hope for a child or grandchild.

Fully understanding those primary needs becomes essential when you approach the target customer. The messages you create will be very different when reaching out to a parent wanting to provide a message of hope to an anxious child than when you want to appeal to a corporate lawyer where the primary motivation is being able to receive a tax contribution receipt or a politician hoping to receive some good publicity and votes from those concerned about climate change.

The end result in each case may be more trees planted, but the customer journey in different scenarios will be very different. The messages you create always begin with a deep understanding of the fundamental, underlying customer needs.

The Psychology of Human Needs

Recognizing the importance of human needs as they relate to motivation and human behavior is not new and not unique to marketing, of course.

According to the psychologist Abraham Maslow, all behavior is motivated by the desire to satisfy universal human needs. At the most basic level, those needs include the essentials needed for survival — food, water, basic physical comfort (warmth), and essential biological functions like breathing and sleep.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is often depicted as a pyramid with those essentials forming the base layer. Only once those basics are covered does one start to move up the pyramid and start worrying about the next level.

Housing, a job, money, and basic security come next and are often labeled as safety. Robust health and wellness are also placed here. As the fundamental needs at the bottom levels of the pyramid are met, relationships, love, and belonging become more important. Friendships, family strength, and involvement in one’s community become important. Health and stability in these areas allow one to thrive and deal with issues like anxiety, depression or feelings of isolation.

As one nears the top of the pyramid, one becomes able to consider personal growth, nurturing self-esteem and feelings of self-respect, and taking care of more subtle psychological and social needs.

Though you may not agree with exactly how the various needs are organized in this model, what is perhaps most useful is the idea that needs motivate actions and that is certainly true when you are trying to motivate a customer to engage with your company in a particular way.

Keep it Simple — Be Concise When Describing Client Needs

Though it’s critical to fully understand exactly what is motivating your customer, it’s also important to be concise and precise when you articulate the driving need. The more clearly you can state the need, the more precise, accurate and effective your marketing messages will be. There should be a direct line between the itch that needs scratching and the back-scratcher that reaches exactly the right spot.

Becoming an analyst (or thoughtful best friend) to your avatar helps you move beyond the ideal customer’s stated desire to a deeper understanding of what underlies her wants, preferences, and desires.

One of the things we ask clients to consider in the avatar-creation step of The Marketing Canvas™ process is to consider both what motivates and what frustrates the customer. We also ask businesses to find the kinds of quotes that resonate with the ideal client and then ask why those quotes are meaningful. All of this groundwork provides a kind of shortcut to thinking about customer needs in a way that’s meaningful within the context of the overall marketing strategy.

Identify Needs Based on Facts

Whenever we are doing this kind of work, we are always looking for evidence-based answers to the many questions we ask. Finding the answers (through Google, Facebook analytics, strategic use of the Amazon search engine, customer surveys or feedback forms, and so on) allows us to create avatars that provide meaningful answers when the business asks of the client, “What do you need from us?”

The ultimate goal is to be able to go back and re-write your company’s value proposition so it aligns neatly with your customer’s needs. When a company is able to effectively do this, the customer is far more likely to respond in a favorable way, to feel that the company understands how to help, and to react as you hope they will — by signing up for a mailing list, making a purchase, or providing reviews and referrals to help provide the social proof that’s so important in any successful online marketing campaign.

State Three Core Needs Before Re-stating Your Value Vision

To start, we encourage businesses to write down three core needs that your customers are looking to meet. Be as concise as possible. Consider where those needs lie in terms of Maslow’s theory. Then, and only then, are you ready to move on to consider how best to restate your company’s value vision.